In the paintings of Dora Lam, this uncertainty begins with the photographic image. Lam draws on colonial and personal archives, isolating the faces of women from their original settings. She renders them with remarkable precision, placing them against sharply defined geometric forms and fields of colour. The faces remain recognisable as portraits, yet almost everything that might establish their circumstances has been removed. Lam is acutely aware of the assumptions through which archival images have been collected and interpreted. Her paintings disturb that inherited authority. The women appear before us with an extraordinary immediacy, while the histories attached to their photographs become open to question.
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